“Stay here,” Ridge commanded. “We’ll be OK. I’ll be back.” Ridge ripped the night goggles off one of the dead men and adjusted the damn thing as best he could. He then raced toward the gunfire. It was coming from two snipers, each in different trees. With goggles, Ridge saw the twins throw grenades simultaneously at one tree. They blew it and the sniper to Holy Hell. Ridge, still thirty yards away downhill, saw the second sniper drop from his tree and storm uphill. The twins, without goggles, were in the blind. But Ridge could see the sniper rushing Terry’s position, and no gunfire coming from it.
For a sudden second, Ridge’s mind flashed to that night, in the aftermath of the bombing, when he carried his faceless buddy in his arms. He screamed “Terry!” Then he charged the hill. With night vision, he moved fast. But so did the goggled sniper. It was a foot race. And the sniper was nearer Terry. Dodging trees and rocks, and running uphill as best he could, Ridge got closer. Closer. But too late.
Before Ridge could raise his weapon, the sniper had already stopped, pointing his rifle down at Terry, and then—a loud, blinding blast. One bullet. To Ridge’s amazement, the sniper toppled sideways like a felled tree. When Ridge got to Terry, he was in some sort of foxhole, a large depression in dirt between two huge rocks. He wasn’t moving, but next to him, dressed in black, was none other than Sasha Kachingski. Glock in hand. Still smoking. The sniper, sprawled out head-first on his right side, was only two feet from Terry. Ridge quickly shot the sonofabitch in the left temple, just to make sure. Then he pulled off his own goggles and jumped in next to Terry and Sasha.
Terry, bleeding from his right arm and left leg, opened his eyes and smiled up at Ridge. “Welcome to the party, big guy. Ain’t much room in here.” His voice was thready. “Already got company.”
“This is one party I would’ve gladly missed.” Sasha said as she put the Glock back by Terry’s side and proceeded to rip the sleeves off her black blouse. She handed one sleeve to Ridge and started to tourniquet Terry’s arm while Ridge bent over his leg.
Ridge looked up, cocked his head. It was quiet. No more gunfire. He tied off the tourniquet and sat back on his heels. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“Long story short, my wonderful client, Chesterfield, introduced me to Gimuldin. First couple of dates went OK. So, Gimuldin asked me if I wanted to see his mountain retreat. Picked me up in that big black Navigator with one of those weird-ass bald kids driving. When we got here, well…let’s just say it wasn’t what I expected. I couldn’t believe what was going on, so I opted out. Gimuldin went to take a piss and I headed up the hillside.
“How did you find Terry?”
“With the dark and all the explosions, I got a little lost. Came across your friend here, lying in this foxhole, Glock at his side. I picked it up. Not much later, when that anteater in goggles tried to shoot us, I fired away. Thought he might have a vest, so I aimed at his head. Luckily, the first bullet hit. Unknown to me, your buddy here left me only one shot.”
Ridge reached over and turned the sniper’s head face up. Besides Ridge’s bullet in his left temple, there was a gaping hole in the middle of his forehead. “Sasha, where the hell did you learn to shoot like that.”
“My father was Army Ranger. Thought we all needed to know how to handle a firearm.”
“Wow. You learned your lessons well,” said Ridge. “We owe you big time.”
“About that,” said Sasha, checking the tightness of the tourniquet that Ridge had tied, “I’m thinking none of this is gonna help my career at Words & Gryme. How about a letter of recommendation?”
“You got it,” Ridge and Terry said at the same time.
Just then the bushes around them shook and the twins thundered in, carrying Uncle Sand. “It’s over,” said Tam. “Everybody’s dead or gone, but us. Terry, so sorry. Uncle Cho…”
“What?”
“Didn’t make it.”
Terry’s face turned ashen. “Oh my God.” He dropped his head. Then he looked up with watering, wide eyes. “Has anyone seen Dan?”
Ridge scrambled from the foxhole, fitted his goggles again and took off toward the Big Tent. He found Dan. On the ground. Spread out by the dying fire. Tied like a pig for slaughter.
Pulling out his knife, Ridge cut the ropes on Dan’s hands and feet, then peeled the tape from his mouth. “You OK, buddy?”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m alright, but what the hell?” He struggled to sit up, then took Ridge’s outstretched hand and got to his feet. Wobbling a bit, he looked around him, eyes growing wider and wider. “Shit. Looks like a goddamn disaster movie. And my head’s splitting. Ears can’t stop ringing.”
“That’s rough,” Ridge said smiling. “Real rough. But you’ll live. Anyway, that’s what you get for laying around while the rest of us worked our asses off.”
EPILOGUE
The blue whales were running. Jayne and Ridge had invited Jenny and her new boyfriend, Tom, along on a Sunday whale-watching cruise. It’d been three months since the firefight in the middle of the wilderness and Terry, recovered from his bullet wounds, and Kate, on the mend from her injuries in the car wreck, joined them. The weather was perfect—a crystalline sky with puffy white clouds, mild winds, and calm blue seas. The boat skimmed along at 25 knots until they reached the southwest cliffs of Palos Verdes Peninsula. Using binoculars and looking out to sea, Jayne spotted the first tail.
Ridge pulled within a hundred yards on the windward side, cut the throttles to neutral, and let them drift toward the whales.
“Why cut the throttles?” Tom asked.
“It’s the law,” said Ridge. “So, humans can’t scare, capture, or control the whales.”
Tom peered through his own binoculars. “I can’t imagine anyone in their right mind harming such beautiful, colossal animals. Can’t believe this is my first time whale watching.” His enthusiasm was infectious and Jenny glanced over at her mother with a smile.
“Hard to believe we’re seeing the largest mammals in the world,” Jayne said. “Can you imagine being 100 feet long?”
As the boat drifted further toward the whales, Jenny and Tom grabbed their cameras. Kate used a videocam. Terry, Jayne, and Ridge became the lookouts.
“My God! There’s another fluke at two o’clock, about fifty yards out,” Jayne shouted, as she watched the whale’s tail rise majestically, spread out, and then slip under water.
“Another at eleven o’clock,” said Terry.
“Look at that!” Ridge called out from the cockpit. “More off our bow. Rolling.” To the west, other whales arched in and out of the water with twenty or thirty seagulls overhead. “Must be lunchtime.”
After a breathtaking ten-minute marine show, one of the whales stuck its pectoral fin out of the water. “It looks like he’s waving goodbye,” Ridge said, pointing. And sure enough, when they got about thirty yards out, all the whales submerged and disappeared.
“That was mind-blowing!” Tom said. “Should we go after them?”
Jenny took his binoculars and scanned the surface around them. “How about we just drift here, have lunch, and hope another pod runs by us on their way south?”
After unanimous consent, they set up lunch on the rear table and, as the visceral excitement of the whale sightings started to wear off and they drifted past the P.V. cliffs toward St. Vincent Lighthouse, conversation turned to other things.
Originally from New Zealand, Tom Road had an accent that made them all smile, even though he’d been in the U.S. for fifteen years. Manager of a computer company that did website designs and other projects, he and Jayne fell naturally into computerese. After ten or fifteen minutes of non-stop jargon, Tom realized Kate, Jenny and Ridge were on the outside looking in, so he changed topics.
“Eric, Jenny tells me you and Terry had quite a bit of excitement in the mountains about three months back. I know you were injured,” he said to Terry, “but how’d that all sort out?”
“That’s a tough question,” Terry broke in.
